Meme #4 - languages

[raven]

Today's question comes from littlered2, who asked: If it's not too personal, languages: which languages you speak, in what contexts, and what they mean to you.

Well, this one is personal (and I'm honestly so touched by your sensitivity in picking that up - it's not immediately obvious as a personal question!), but I am trying to talk - and let myself think - about it more, so here we go.

Languages! Okay. I am good with, and love languages. (I have to remind myself of this a lot, for reasons which will become clear in a moment.) Not in the sense that I'm a super-effective communicator or whatever as the job apps would have it; I mean languages in themselves, their grammars and structures and interesting twiddly bits. (I write stories and I draft things for a living. I figure all of this goes together.)

So the first language I ever spoke was Hindi, and Hindi more than any other is the language of home - both for me, and for everyone; if any one language could be, Hindi would be India's national language, and that makes sense in a way because Hindi is an acquisitive workhorse of a language, anecdotal and crude and beautiful and weird. Hindi speakers, more than any other, drift into English and Urdu and all the other languages of India when they talk; there is this push towards Sanskritisation in India, using new coinages and back-formations, trying to make a purer tongue of it, but I don't think it's terribly successful. For me, Hindi is the language of making tea, getting the milk in, can you chop a couple of onions, and stay tuned, we'll be back after this.

There's more to it, of course. But I lost it. I had it, and I lost it. If I could have any wish granted, it would be to go back in time, to my parents who were so scared - justifiably scared! - that I would never fit in, and we would never go home. I lost Hindi as my language of choice by the time I was six; by the time I was sixteen, it had gone almost entirely; now, I'm twenty-six, and it's back, in moods and lights, and I work at it and I get by, but sometimes there's no there there, like, just, some awful howling loss where an identity-constitutive grammar should live. (This is what I mean when I talk about the decolonisation of the mind - how to rid yourself, both of internalised colonialism, and also guilt: that because you were on the wrong side of a system that didn't want you, it's not you that's made wrong. I dumped a Hindi teacher I had once for not understanding this.) What comforts me at this stage is that it is there, somewhere. I was in India for six days in October and by the sixth day I was reaching for it without thinking; my grandfather once said, live with me for six months and I know you'd be reading me the newspaper. Which was kind, and maybe even true. I hope it was, and is.

(I can read Devanagari script, something of which I am inordinately proud. I read at the grade school level, slowly, sounding everything out, and I annoy everyone by stopping in the middle of the street to do this. Mostly, people observing this come to the conclusion that I have a learning disability.)

I also speak French. Kind of. I had no choice about French - I had a polyglot primary school teacher who loved teaching it, and it's the one I kept on with through secondary school - and although I wish very much that I had more of it, and had kept up with what I had, I think I'm actually at the stage with French where the only thing that will convert me to easy fluency is moving to France for six months and getting unstuck trying to order soup. As a language, I never used to like it very much, but I'm coming around to it now as I get the feel of it as well as just learning it - I like its softness and its elegance of expression. On ne puisse pas rentrer. Yes. Since I left school I've had friends who spoke French from francophone Africa, and oddly, that helped: I thought it was beautiful and grounding to hear it from non-white people.

The only other language I speak anything worth mentioning of is Gaelic, and Gaelic is wonderful - it's so beautiful and fascinating and replete with a kind of musicality, I adore it, and given all my capital-I Issues detailed above, it's a gift. Why learn to speak Gaelic? Not because it's my mother tongue. Not because it would be particularly useful for anything. Not because I'm likely to meet another speaker I didn't already know about! But just because it's a beautiful language, and I love it and I'm pleased to be a statistically significant addition to its body of speakers.

There are some others: I can understand some conversational Bengali because my mother's family are all Bengali, and I have two years of Spanish I can't remember, and have been taught Welsh, though I couldn't say a single meaningful thing about it at this remove of time. Oh, and I have four years of Latin - which I remember the shape of, rather than the substance; I absolutely love Latin grammar and how regular and interesting it is, amo amas amat amamus, etc; and in conjunction with that I was taught some Greek (I'm English-public-school-educated, shut up) - and my father taught me the very beginnings of Sanskrit grammar. He loves Urdu poetry and has tried teaching me the basics of that, to no avail; I believe if my father's father had lived longer, he would have had more success teaching me. Something else that comforts me: my grandfather had never had Hindi, either. He learned it in his thirties and was deeply distrustful of it all his life.

(Oh, English! I forgot about English. Despite everything, I love English: though it isn't home, and has never been designed to be a language for living in, it has been a good place all these years. I love writing in English, I love its wacky spelling and ridiculous plethora of synonyms for everything and shameless biffing up of other languages for vocabulary and cheerful lack of grammatical gender. English is just, it's wonderful and ridiculous and amazing. Did I mention I love languages? Because I really, really do.)

Comments

[silverhare]

Eeee, this is such a lovely post - full of joy and a real taste for the languages. I wish I had more of a mind for spoken languages, but sign language fits and flows with me so much easier. It's intuitive and clever and something with it seems to click for me. :)

[raven]

<3 <3

[sabra_n]

I didn't realize this until, oh, a good fifteen years later when they told me, but my parents were scared, too, that I'd never learn English and never learn to get along in the States, so they went full-immersion with me, and by golly it worked. My Hebrew never has fully come back, though admittedly I could make more of an effort than slowly picking my way through translated Harry Potter. But it's still sitting in the crevices of my brain, and sometimes I can't think of the English word for something and I'm kind of glad.

[raven]

I have that moment of gladness, too. :) I'm always so pleased (pleased? is that the word? I dunno, but you know what I mean) to hear other people have shared this experience. <3

[pearwaldorf]

This is pretty much exactly my feelings on Chinese. When I was younger, my parents were afraid I wouldn't learn English properly so they sent me to American preschool. They tried to send me to Chinese school when I was in middle school, but what child wants to spend Saturday cooped up learning things they would have rather forgotten? So I totally feel you on the going back part, and the decolonization of mind.

And the most damnable part for me about trying to (re)learn it as an adult is that it's all back there somewhere, instinctual enough that I cannot intellectualize the grammar like I can with Spanish or French or any other language I've tried to learn. I suspect if I moved to China and had to actually use the language it would come back, but I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.

[raven]

When I wrote "when you lay me down you'll bury only bones" this was on my mind; I remember you told me a little about your experience with Chinese back then too. I feel like talking about it really helps, actually. Thank you very much for telling me this. <3 <3

[hedda62]

Really fascinating, thank you - I love reading other people's thoughts on language, and I love writing about language and about people who speak and think in more than one, though I am alas pretty much monoglot myself. (I mean, I have studied French, Latin, German, Italian, and Russian, and in a small writing-necessary way, Dutch, but none of them has stuck. I might get to the point of speaking pathetic French if I lived in a French-speaking place for a while. Two weeks in Peru did teach me to hear a little Spanish, though I was too afraid to speak it; otherwise I'd think I have no ear for languages whatsoever.)

I especially love your affectionate and differing descriptions of Hindi and English, and your knowledge that languages have such distinct personalities, and your ability to say it so well.

[raven]

I am thinking of that beautiful story you wrote for me, about Simon Illyan and languages, and memory. I know you have an ear for them. <3 <3 I'm really pleased this post spoke to you.

[cosmic_llin]

This is such a cool post! Languages are the best! Grammar-wise I think you'd like German, it's very regular. In German the verb goes at the end of the sentence and you can put as much other information as you like in before it, which makes it kind of suspenseful and exciting and then really satisfying when you actually get to the verb. Plus they have some incredible compound nouns.

Losing languages is hard - I'm glad you got some of your Hindi back. Not remotely the same situation, but, it makes me sad when I think of how downhill my Welsh has gone. (Although high-five for Gaelic, which is kind of like Welsh's weird cousin!)

(Not that Gaelic is weird in itself, just in comparison to Welsh, because so many of the words are recognisably similar but they went with c instead of p for loads of words. Also interestingly if you are a Welsh speaker with at least basic French, you can basically understand Breton.)

[raven]

That is very interesting, about Welsh and Gaelic (and Breton!) Are Welsh and Gaelic mutually intelligible? (aka, can I come spout Gaelic at you hopefully? :P)

German is one of the few western European languages I know nothing of at all, not a word. (okay, ja and nein I guess.) All I know of it comes from this essay by Mark Twain, which cracks me up rather a lot for something written a century ago. :)

[cosmic_llin]

Not hugely, I don't think - from what little I know, it's definitely easier to see the similarities in writing because of how much the pronunciations have diverged, but next time we're in the same place let's give it a go? I doubt I'll get sentences but common nouns and verbs are often close.

Hahaha, that's hilarious. But I love separable verbs! And German grammar certainly makes more logical sense than English.

[fiercynn]

oh, my god, reading this felt kind of like a punch in the gut, because yes, the way you write about Hindi seems like exactly how I feel about Tamil and Malayalam, both of which I spoke before I learned English, and subsequently lost after starting school. There's an added dimension to my guilt about losing them, because my parents wanted very badly for me to keep speaking their languages (particularly because both of my grandmothers used to come and stay with us for extended periods of time in the States), but when I started school I apparently refused to speak anything other than English, even at home. And I should know now that it wasn't my fault, exactly; that being a five-year-old kid born in the US but still different from everyone else in my class probably made me stubborn and desperate in equal measures. But it wasn't my parents' fault either for giving in to what seemed to make me more comfortable, so I tend to place the guilt on myself.

I too have regained some of my Tamil - primarily because we adopted my younger sister was Chennai when I was twelve and she was five, and I managed to pick up some before she went all the way into English (she now speaks even less Tamil than I do), and also from living in Tamil Nadu for three months before starting college. And it feels familiar - my vocabulary is limited, but understanding it comes naturally, unlike my relationship with Spanish, where I still translate everything into English in my head rather than processing it in and of itself. But I've lost Malayalam completely, and it feels kind of heartbreaking, especially when I could no longer connect to my maternal grandmother merely because of the language barrier. She died ten years ago, and I still regret not having gotten to know her better after I was five.

English does feel like home to me, but the fact of that is also sort of terrifying because I know it wasn't always that way, and trying to imagine my life without English feels...I'm not sure how to describe how much fear that gives me, to know that I used to think in different languages that I no longer have anymore, at least not in the same way. I also felt sort of stunned the first time I realized that my parents don't think in English and sometimes still feel like they have bad days with it - which I should have known, really, but it had never occurred to me before - because I learned English mostly from them, and English is how I communicate with them. I'm still not sure how that affects my own relationship with English.

ANYWAY, tl;dr, thank you so much for this post.

[raven]

Thank you for telling me this. <3 I wrote above that I had resolved to talk about it more - the reason is, I know I have friends who've lived through this narrative, too. But I feel guilt - you feel guilt - we don't talk about it. I feel like it's so much better when we talk about it. Much love, honey.

[anehan]

I came over here from this year's language post, and I thought that maybe I should answer to this post here instead of over there.

Actually, I really don't know what to say about this, except that the stuff about Hindi and the decolonisation of the mind was... I don't actually know what it was, except that I feel honoured for being allowed to read about it.

I also wanted to ask you whether you've ever heard anyone speak or sing in Icelandic? I don't speak Icelandic and neither do I speak Scottish Gaelic, but the feel I get from the sound of those languages is similar. In case you're interested, this song was my introduction to Icelandic.

[raven]

I know very little about Icelandic, so thank you - I don't believe Gaelic and Icelandic are very closely related, so that's very interesting to know.:)

[anehan]

Yeah, Gaelic is a Celtic language while Icelandic is a Germanic one. But they both have a kind of musical quality to them. I absolutely love the sound of both of those languages

[riverlight]

Here via your recent post about Hindi, and reading this made me think! So interesting.

My own experience isn't quite the same—I never had Swedish, growing up, so it's not that I forgot it. But I did grow up hearing my mom and her parents and sisters speaking it, even if I didn't understand a word. And I found, when I went to study it later in high school and college, that I had a very good accent for a non-native speaker; there was something about the stresses and cadences that I "got," and I attribute this entirely to hearing it so much. Have you found a similar thing with Hindi? I mean, there's so much research about the way hearing a language in infancy and childhood shapes our brains, right?

[raven]

I've read that same research, I think! That suggests the phonemes heard by a baby before the age of language acquisition remain with them, so the sounds and silences of a language should be with you even in later life. But I think I'm not a good comparator on that point, because I was never not able to understand the language, you know? And Hindi is the sort of language that requires a lot of fine-grained consonant differentiation in order to understand it, so the sounds of it definitely stayed with me.

[riverlight]

Right, that's what I meant! Glad you understood. We were laughing at my sister, last night (by "we" I mean the assembled family, who are all together for my grandmother's memorial service) because she was attributing things to "science." "Science says…" she'd say, and we'd all be like: uh huh. Science. And I kind of feel like that's what I did here, but you got it.

:)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

This is such a beautiful, fascinating post. Thank you for posting it publicly.

I envy polyglots: when I was a child I scolded my parents for emigrating between two countries that spoke the same language, as all my fellow immigrant friends were bilingual. (Fortunately, they found this hilarious.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

You're welcome; thank you for reading it. :)

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful post. Thank you for writing it.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

<3 you're very welcome.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

Thank you for answering this. I'm glad you didn't feel it was too intrusive. <3

So many languages! I am impressed. (I am so filled with admiration for people who learn multiple languages, and so envious of people whose background means they have grown up speaking more than one.) I only have English as a language I'm comfortable in. I have a year's worth of German, from ten years ago, added to by various Chalet School phrases and vocabulary from my sister (she studied it to GCSE level and spoke it around the house); I took French right up until A Level, and always found it very easy at school, but we weren't being taught to speak it, really - we were being taught to answer the questions in the textbook and pass our exams, and most people didn't want to be there. I can read textbooks, but actual working French is beyond me (we never did any literature at school, and the law reports in French I come across at work are near-incomprehensible; I'm bad at understanding it if it's spoken to me) and can barely speak in it. I wish I had a better grasp of it. And there's Old and Middle English, but Oxford's approach was very much, "Here is a book on Old English. Read it, then read these poems and write an essay on them". I would love to be able to read them both at sight, but it's much more of a "looking things up in the back of the book, relying heavily on a facing-page translation" slog.

I'm sorry that English isn't home for you (just because as the language you speak every day, that sounds a bit hard), and I'm very sorry that you lost your Hindi. That sounds really difficult and upsetting; I can't imagine. But I'm glad it's not lost completely. I'm sorry the world is such that it meant you lost it.

I would quite like to learn Hindi one day. So many people speak it that it seems missing out not to (also, I am lazy and am comforted by the thought that it is Indo-European and, you know, I already speak one of those, so it seems more doable than a completely different language family would be). Also, BSL (I can do the alphabet, mostly).

(And yes, you are really good at language.)